Skepticism

EVENTS

The Discovery Institute released a video of one of their stars, Ann Gauger, explaining the flaws in “population genetics” (I put it in quotes because it wasn’t a description of the field of population genetics that any competent biologist would recognize). Larry Moran points out the errors.

But of course that’s exactly what the DI wants. They can’t answer for the stupidity of her comments, but they can wave their hands and shout, “We do too have a lab! A real lab! And it’s sciencey and everything!” Because, after all, when you’re doing cargo cult science, the props are all important, and the substance doesn’t matter.

Errm, are we supposed to be impressed? I could give you an equivalent photo of a few shelves in one of our student labs — it would look similar, just messier. A petri dish, a few orange-top bottles, a small hood in the background—all they needed to make it really sciencey were a few bubbling bottles of colored water. D. James Kennedy did a better job in “Darwin’s Deadly Legacy”.

See? Now that’s a lab!

But seriously, the furniture does not make the lab — the work being done in it does. When you think it matters that you can pose with a petri dish, you really are doing cargo cult science.

And y’know, that ‘do too have a lab!’ picture, that’s got caption contest written all over it…

My entries…

‘Yeah… I dunno… I think this thing’s too big for the goal slots in the air hockey table.’

‘I just don’t get this stuff at all. Really not tasty. Makes no sense to serve it by itself in its own, special dish, either, but y’know foodies, gotta have the champagne flute, the red wine glass, the bread plate, so of course there’s a special dish for ‘petri’, too… Hey, maybe if they put it in a savoury soup? Tofu’s pretty okay that way, anyway.’

I actually clicked through to the evolutionnews site. I noticed a bunch of stuff about C.S. Lewis, a religious apologist. So I guess all that “ID is science and has nothing to do with religion” stuff is over.

Next time someone says that MDs are easily wooed by woo and only PhDs can be real scientists, I’m going to mention Ann Gauger.

Sadly, it appears that not even good training in science protects the brain against woo it really wants to believe.

As for the photo, if she’s doing something with sterile agar, it likely involves bacteria and she should be proving evolution in a couple of generations. At least I never could keep the damn things from evolving out from under me…antibiotic selection? Who needs a transgene to be abx resistant?

“Typically, filming in a genuine location like this would be troublesome for us and bothersome for others who work there — a distraction for all involved, including viewers, when the intent is to focus on the argument. “

Yes, yes, I’m sure filming in the DI “laboratory” would be distracting to the hoards of scientists working their, or the person who answers the DI’s phones in the same room. And it would be so distracting to viewers. Wait, to viewers?

“Here is Richard Dawkins interviewed by Bill Maher with Dawkins in front of a backdrop depicting London’s River Thames and the London Eye ferris wheel.

Nice photo. Would anyone actually entertain the idea that Dawkins was filmed in front of a huge picture window through which we may observe this scene in real time? Most viewers wouldn’t think about it for a moment — the interest is in Dawkins’s words not the picture behind him.”

Er, yeah, except Dawkins isn’t pretending he owns the Thames river and the London Eye, unlike DI who pretended to own and work in the lab in the stock photo.

The way she is posing with the petri dish is just so weird. This photo just hits you over the head with the message that she’s doing “research” in her “lab.” It’s just so forced. Most of the photos I see of scientists in their labs feature them just sitting there with their labmates, with no need to appear to be “sciencing.”

“We do real science! Look, here’s a scientist looking at a petri dish. Here’s another mixing colored liquids from various tubes! That one is pressing buttons on a sciencey-looking device. We’re sciencing as hard as we can!”

I just did a Web Of Science (database of scientific publications) search on Gauger. She had something in New Scientist in 2007, along with Douglas Axe and Brendan Dixon titled “Good science will come.”
I looked up the reference, and it was a letter to the editor, not a research article.
That was 5 years ago, so I guess it’s a long time coming.

Hey I know where there is a very sciencey machine with lights and knobs and buttons and dials and a roll of old continuous computer paper coming out of it. It was built by a now-deceased geologist to measure thermoluminecense on prehistoric artifacts back when getting such a machine from the manufacturer cost mo bunch monies. It worked too.

True, it has been completely obsolete for more than 20 years and the lab keeps it around as a sort of memorial to that very much beloved old man and as a sort of sciencey decoration in the area we use as outreach for elementary school kids.

But they are very hard up for cash, and if the DI offered them enough for it, they might be tempted.

the question is not about them having PhDs and thus somehow being a problem for any science field. The question is: WHY do we let these clowns get them in the first place? I knew Wells, and he WAS a clown. In the MVZ at Berkeley, the only reason we could figure that Molecular and Cell Biology even allowed him into the degree program to begin with was his Daddy Warbucks (Read: the now deceased, thankfully, Reverend Moon)

so the discussion of course shouldn’t be about their impacts on science, post degree, because they have none. The discussion should be about what to do when you discover a PhD candidate is deliberately lying to your department about wanting to do science to begin with.

Now, I can understand that there should be absolutely nothing to debate regarding an UNDERGRAD trying to game the system; we figure at least they might learn something. But that is not the purpose of graduate training.

In the original vid, the speaker was well off-center, and the lab was centered in the frame—they were emphasizing the lab.Oddly, she wasn’t wearing a lab coat in the vid, but a very nice scarf—what was that about?

In the “real” lab they show in the photo, there isn’t enough room for more than a second person, so their original excuse about not disturbing the other workers goes right out the window. I’ve run a water-quality lab that was bigger than that, and it could only usefully accommodate two people—it had a stockroom that was more like the photo.

Seriously, they couldn’t stop lab work long enough to film a vid, nor find any time when the lab wasn’t busy? Hint: The stock photo was labelled “lab at night”.

I have examined many a petri dish, and have never held one up like that to do so. Possibly there is some issue with distance vision, there, but the light just isn’t at any useful angle.

They’ve done something wrong, then tried to cover it up, then blown the coverup. Now, of course, they are claiming that the whole fuss is because nobody can touch their science.

I just retired a couple months ago, from 40 years in the lab. Her pic looks sort of realistic to me. A low cost PCR hood in the background, various protocols and recipes taped to the shelves. The Petri dish with E. coli, the blue nitrile gloves. All standard fair in a basic lab. What’s counts though is what you do with these materials and WHAT YOU PUBLISH in peer reviewed journals. She has the look but not the pubs.

That telescope, I think Toyworld have them for $16.99. The only thing you can do with them is spy in your neighbour’s bedroom. That’s proper creation science you know, observing how other people mange the ass-pulling techniques without getting their hands dirty. The first product developed from this branch of science was blue plastic gloves.

Here in TN, they have taken steps though new legislation to allow creationism back into the classroom. This law turns the clock back nearly 100 years here in the seemingly unprogressive South and is simply embarrassing. There is no argument against the Theory of Evolution other than that of religious doctrine. The Monkey Law only opens the door for fanatic Christianity to creep its way back into our classrooms. You can see my visual response as a Tennessean to this absurd law on my artist’s blog at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2012/04/pulpit-in-classroom-biblical-agenda-in.html with some evolutionary art and a little bit of simple logic.

About those blue gloves. In my experience those are nitrile rather than latex. Do you really need those in biology? Chemists use them because they’re a tad more resistant to organics, but that’s about it.

I’m trying to imagine a laboratory that could properly investigate the well-formulated theory that an unobserved intelligence, through means that we don’t understand, at an unknown time and place, did something (we don’t know what), for a reason (that we can’t guess), that resulted in our existence. These people seem woefully under-equipped.

Maybe if the DI people put together a list of the equipment they need, along with an explanation of what the equipment would be used for, we could properly allocate the necessary resources. Perhaps a network of orbital particle accelerators to sweep for cloaked spaceships? Ground-penetrating radar to search for hidden, 4 billion year old genetic engineering facilities far below the surface of the earth? A handheld deity detector? Just tell us what you need. We must support the scientificish community.

…she was actually talking in front of a green screen, and a stock photo of a lab was spliced in behind her.

Wait. Really? How can those goobers not understand how the Internet works? A little effort to make their own fake lab background, and they’d never have been caught. But a stock photo? Not one of them knows about Google image search? Morons.

Not only at the same location; the two photos were almost certainly taken at the same time. Purely staged publicity shots — “using a pipette”, “staring at a petri dish”… I bet there’s a “looking into a microscope” shot to complete the set.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with having staged publicity photos… provided there’s also some evidence of you actually doing the work you’re portrayed as doing.

From the article:

Using a green screen is a totally standard technique that you’ve seen countless times on TV and in videos, especially documentary filmmaking. It’s a convention. You want to protest the convention and make a fuss? Be my guest, knock yourself out. Here is Richard Dawkins interviewed by Bill Maher with Dawkins in front of a backdrop depicting London’s River Thames and the London Eye ferris wheel.

Do they understand why it’s a convention though?
It’s a visual shorthand to say to the viewer, “this person is in London“. Drop some clearly identifiable regional landmarks behind the subject to remind you that they’re not in the same room as the interviewer, but they’re doing it via satellite. It’s not intended to represent the literal truth of a view over the subject’s shoulder, but it conveys useful information.

As anyone taken stock pictures in a lab? Trust me, they all either feature the most expensive equipment (all the way down to the UV-VIS) or are candid shots of people doing things they shouldn’t be in a lab (such as sleeping in a hood). If their most important piece of equipment is that petri dish or the micropipette in the other picture I’m going to have to doubt the existence of their “lab”. Most breweries/wineries have better stocked labs than this picture indicates.

I use 95% ethanol, 99% isopropanol, Triton X-100, acetone, methanol, and ether all of the time in my lab. Also, about the no mask thing, if that’s an E. coli plate, I’m not surprised she’s not wearing one. I don’t, and neither does any other molecular biologist I know. And we have a real population geneticist at my institution. None of the issues with the equipment matter though, because cargo cult science doesn’t require perfection. It just has to look like science is being done.

When I ran a water-quality lab, I grew bacteria cultures in petri dishes. I never wore a mask. I do not remember all the solvents, but we used alcohol for sterilization, and I got to take home an old carboy of acetic acid (I diluted it to vinegar and used it for cleaning). The lab I see her in looks a lot like that little lab, not a high-powered research laboratory.

Whatever the “Tute is doing, it isn’t serious.Their “Biologic” is bilge.

I say again, look at the video, and see where she is in the screen. The center of her face is centered in the left half of the screen—one-fourth of the way in. Hardly any of her reaches the center of the screen. There is a rule of thirds, that might excuse having her off-center, but not that far. The fake lab predominates in the shot, and the real lab is a joke.

About the colored solutions in the “laboratory”: should not be more safe, in a real laboratory, if the solutions had diferent colors, to prevent acidents by mixing or using the wrong solution?

It is a honest question, maybe can be a stupid question for someone that work in a laboratory, but im no specialist in that kind of thing.

I can sort of see what you mean, but it’s not a common practice (at least in the UK, and from what I’ve seen as a student). I guess it could work, but only in those situations where colourants wouldn’t interfere with the work (dyes can be reactive too), and everyone can see and understand the colour differences (colourblindness, lab visitors and so on could limit such a system’s usefulness).